Presentation

At the de Young Museum in San Francisco, TEF created an installation that provided cultural context around songs by influential groups such as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company as part of the "The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll” exhibit in 2017. 

Preservation

TEF worked with the Country Music Hall of Fame to preserve their long standing “Dylan, Cash, and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” exhibit, which ran through February 2018.

Education

TEF built an educational presentation as part of Bob Santelli’s Grammy Museum workshop for high school students at First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Smithsonian Salutes Ray Charles: In Performance At The White House" in 2016. 

ROBERT SANTELLI

Robert Santelli is the Executive Director of the Grammy Museum, a 32,000 square-foot facility in downtown Los Angeles with “more music per square foot than anywhere else in America.” Santelli is also the Experience Music Project’s Executive Director, overseeing the development of all museum content, public programming, and education initiatives. He also currently leads development for the British Music Experience. Santelli spent five years with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, most recently as Vice President of Education and Public Programs. A rock ‘n’ roll and blues aficionado, Santelli has published seven books on the subject.

SCOTT B. SPENCER

Scott B. Spencer researches and writes about music at the intersections of oral history and digital technology. He received his PhD in Ethnomusicology from New York University, and has taught courses in Music, American Studies, Irish Studies, English and Performance Studies at institutions including Villanova and Drew Universities, Trinity College Dublin, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has also served as Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow for the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Irish American Cultural Institute Visiting Research Fellow in Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.  Spencer has held administrative positions at NYU, CUNY, The Cultural Data Project, and the USC Shoah Foundation. His most recent publication is The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folk Songs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity. He currently teaches courses at the USC Thornton School of Music.

ALICE RANDALL

Alice Randall is a professor at Vanderbilt University where she has been on the faculty since 2003. In the Fall of 2015 she debuted a new course entitled "African-American Presence and Influence in Country Music." Randall is credited with being the first black woman to write a number one country song, "XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl)," recorded by Trisha Yearwood, and is a recipient of ASCAP’s Silver Circle honor. Randall’s novels include: The Wind Done Gone; Pushkin and the Queen of Spades; Rebel Yell, and Ada’s Rules. In 2007 Randall, a New York Times best selling author, wrote one of the first long profiles of Mrs. Obama, "The Meta of Michelle" which appeared in Elle Magazine and in Elle Italia. Randall counts as one of her most treasured possessions her letter from the First Lady commending Ada’s Rules. Randall is the subject of a chapter “Alice Randall and the Integration of Country Music” in Hidden in the Mix the gold standard scholarly text on Black presence and influence in Country Music.

DANIEL A. SHAW

Daniel A. Shaw is a Colorado-based writer, musician and philanthropist. He has written for dozens of publications, including the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Grist.org and the Los Angeles Times. Daniel is president of the Catto Shaw Foundation, a family foundation that supports organizations and programs working in the areas of conservation, creativity and social justice.